Shogun_ A Novel of Japan - James Clavell [0]
A bold English adventurer. An invincible Japanese warlord. A beautiful woman torn between two ways of life, two ways of love. All brought together in a mighty saga of a time and place aflame with conflict, passion, ambition, lust and the struggle for power…
PRAISE FOR
James Clavell
and his phenomenal best seller
SHŌGUN
“SUPERBLY CRAFTED … grips the reader like a riptide … gets the juices flowing!”
—Washington Star*
•
“SHŌGUN IS IRRESISTIBLE … I can’t remember when a novel has seized my mind like this one. Perhaps it was the author’s Hong Kong novel Tai-Pan…. James Clavell breathes narrative. It’s almost impossible not to continue to read SHŌGUN once having opened it. Yet it’s not only something that you read—you live it … possessed by the Englishman Blackthorne, the Japanese lord Toranaga and medieval Japan…. People, customs, settings, needs and desires all become so enveloping you forget who and where you are.”
—The New York Times Book Review
•
“A TALE SURGING WITH ACTION, INTRIGUE AND LOVE … A HUGE CAST … VAST AND DRAMATIC … STUNNING … SAVAGE … BEAUTIFUL … AN EXTRAORDINARY PERFORMANCE!”
—Publishers Weekly
•
“EXCITING, TOTALLY ABSORBING … be prepared for late nights, meals untasted, business unattended….”
—Philadelphia Inquirer
•
“Adventure and action, the suspense of danger, shocking, touching human relationships … a climactic human story.”
—Los Angeles Times
•
“Adventure, intrigue, love … death, bloodshed and sex … reader, you’ll love it!”
—Library Journal
•
“A COLOSSAL WORK IN EVERY WAY … a huge panorama … but you won’t want it shorter by one sentence.”
—Cosmopolitan
BOOKS BY
JAMES CLAVELL
WHIRLWIND
NOBLE HOUSE
SHŌGUN
KING RAT
TAI-PAN
THE CHILDREN’S STORY
GAI-JIN
Table of Contents
Other Books By This Author
Title Page
Dedication
Author’s Note
Prologue
Book One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Book Two
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Book Three
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Book Four
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Book Five
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Book Six
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Copyright
For two seafarers, Captains, Royal Navy,
who loved their ships more than their women
—as was expected of them.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
I would like to thank all those here, in Asia, and in Europe—the living and the dead—who helped to make this novel possible.
Lookout Mountain, California
PROLOGUE
The gale tore at him and he felt its bite deep within and he knew that if they did not make landfall in three days they would all be dead. Too many deaths on this voyage, he thought, I’m Pilot-Major of a dead fleet. One ship left out of five—eight and twenty men from a crew of one hundred and seven and now only ten can walk and the rest near death and our Captain-General one of them. No food, almost no water and what there is, brackish and foul.
His name was John Blackthorne and he was alone on deck but for the bowsprit lookout—Salamon the mute—who huddled in the lee, searching the sea ahead.
The ship heeled in a sudden squall and Blackthorne held on to the arm of the seachair that was lashed near the wheel on the quarterdeck until she righted, timbers squealing. She was the Erasmus, two hundred and sixty tons, a three-masted trader-warship out of Rotterdam, armed with twenty cannon and sole survivor of the first expeditionary force sent from the Netherlands to ravage the enemy in the New World.